The latest twist in this sad tale is the death of defendant Neal Cassada one day before he was set to go to trial for the murder of UNCC coed Ira Yarmolenko. Not just any twist — a made for A&E scene where Cassada, 55, drops dead after being read a newspaper account of his upcoming trial.
I think Cassada realized that his cousin — and co-defendant in the case — Mark Carver had been persuaded by District Attorney Locke Bell to testify against Cassada. Bell telegraphed this possibility by separating the trials of the two men, putting Cassada in the dock first. Add in the fact that the DNA evidence is slightly more compelling regarding Cassada than Carver and I think we can see where this was headed. But we’ll never know for certain.
What we do know is that the DNA evidence is very weak — of the evidence taken from the cords around Yarmolenko neck and under her fingernails, none of it matched Cassada or Carver. This is a near impossibility. Some DNA evidence does suggest that Cassada and possibly Carver may have fiddled with Yarmolenko’s car. That’s it.
Other holes abound. Yarmolenko was placed on the Catawba River on the mere SBI supposition that she went there to take photographs for a class — reversing initial police theories that she had been abducted from near the UNCC campus and driven to the secluded spot by her killer. The SBI theory requires that Yarmolenko drove herself 30 minutes away to crash her car on the banks of the river, where she was more or less immediately jumped and strangled by two fishing buddies without any serious prior criminal past, one of whom — Carver — stayed on the river to keep fishing.
You got to feel for all the families in this mess who so much wanted some sort of closure and finality in what has been one of the more baffling murder cases in the Charlotte area. But now that closure is extremely unlikely without a trial for Cassada. Locke Bell, however, has pretty much received what he bargained for in proceeding with a case utterly dependent on flipping one of the defendants to testify against the other.
As a result, I do not see how the state can sustain a case against Carver, who can now merely assert Cassada is fully responsible. It will not matter if it is true — the search for truth in the murder case of Ira Yarmolenko got off track very early on.
